Django produces multiple Celery tasks through chains in one script run (f.e. if / is opened in browser, 1000 tasks are called by delay method).
I need something that will restrict new task generation, if tasks, queued in previous script run, are still running.
You need a distributed lock for this, which celery doesn't offer natively.
For these kinds of locks I've found redis.Lock useful to most cases. If you need a semaphore, you can use redis' atomic incr/decr functions along with some kind of watchdog mechanism to ensure your processes are still running.
You can restrict the number of tasks of one type running at the same time by setting:
rate_limit = “1000/m”
=> only 1000 tasks of this type can run per minute.
(see http://docs.celeryproject.org/en/latest/userguide/tasks.html#list-of-options)
Related
We have a web app made with pyramid and served through gunicorn+nginx. It works with 8 worker threads/processes
We needed to jobs, we have chosen apscheduler. here is how we launch it
from apscheduler.events import EVENT_JOB_EXECUTED, EVENT_JOB_ERROR
from apscheduler.scheduler import Scheduler
rerun_monitor = Scheduler()
rerun_monitor.start()
rerun_monitor.add_interval_job(job_to_be_run,\
seconds=JOB_INTERVAL)
The issue is that all the worker processes of gunicorn pick the scheduler up. We tried implementing a file lock but it does not seem like a good enough solution. What would be the best way to make sure at any given time only one of the worker process picks the scheduled event up and no other thread picks it up till next JOB_INTERVAL?
The solution needs to work even with mod_wsgi in case we decide to switch to apache2+modwsgi later. It needs to work with single process development server which is waitress.
Update from the bounty sponsor
I'm facing the same issue described by the OP, just with a Django app. I'm mostly sure adding this detail won't change much if the original question. For this reason, and to gain a bit more of visibility, I also tagged this question with django.
Because Gunicorn is starting with 8 workers (in your example), this forks the app 8 times into 8 processes. These 8 processes are forked from the Master process, which monitors each of their status & has the ability to add/remove workers.
Each process gets a copy of your APScheduler object, which initially is an exact copy of your Master processes' APScheduler. This results in each "nth" worker (process) executing each job a total of "n" times.
A hack around this is to run gunicorn with the following options:
env/bin/gunicorn module_containing_app:app -b 0.0.0.0:8080 --workers 3 --preload
The --preload flag tells Gunicorn to "load the app before forking the worker processes". By doing so, each worker is "given a copy of the app, already instantiated by the Master, rather than instantiating the app itself". This means the following code only executes once in the Master process:
rerun_monitor = Scheduler()
rerun_monitor.start()
rerun_monitor.add_interval_job(job_to_be_run,\
seconds=JOB_INTERVAL)
Additionally, we need to set the jobstore to be anything other than :memory:.This way, although each worker is its own independent process unable of communicating with the other 7, by using a local database (rather then memory) we guarantee a single-point-of-truth for CRUD operations on the jobstore.
from apscheduler.schedulers.background import BackgroundScheduler
from apscheduler.jobstores.sqlalchemy import SQLAlchemyJobStore
rerun_monitor = Scheduler(
jobstores={'default': SQLAlchemyJobStore(url='sqlite:///jobs.sqlite')})
rerun_monitor.start()
rerun_monitor.add_interval_job(job_to_be_run,\
seconds=JOB_INTERVAL)
Lastly, we want to use the BackgroundScheduler because of its implementation of start(). When we call start() in the BackgroundScheduler, a new thread is spun up in the background, which is responsible for scheduling/executing jobs. This is significant because remember in step (1), due to our --preload flag we only execute the start() function once, in the Master Gunicorn process. By definition, forked processes do not inherit the threads of their Parent, so each worker doesn't run the BackgroundScheduler thread.
from apscheduler.jobstores.sqlalchemy import SQLAlchemyJobStore
rerun_monitor = BackgroundScheduler(
jobstores={'default': SQLAlchemyJobStore(url='sqlite:///jobs.sqlite')})
rerun_monitor.start()
rerun_monitor.add_interval_job(job_to_be_run,\
seconds=JOB_INTERVAL)
As a result of all of this, every Gunicorn worker has an APScheduler that has been tricked into a "STARTED" state, but actually isn't running because it drops the threads of it's parent! Each instance is also capable of updating the jobstore database, just not executing any jobs!
Check out flask-APScheduler for a quick way to run APScheduler in a web-server (like Gunicorn), and enable CRUD operations for each job.
I found a fix that worked with a Django project having a very similar issue. I simply bind a TCP socket the first time the scheduler starts and check against it subsequently. I think the following code can work for you as well with minor tweaks.
import sys, socket
try:
sock = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_STREAM)
sock.bind(("127.0.0.1", 47200))
except socket.error:
print "!!!scheduler already started, DO NOTHING"
else:
from apscheduler.schedulers.background import BackgroundScheduler
scheduler = BackgroundScheduler()
scheduler.start()
print "scheduler started"
Short answer: You can't do it properly without consequences.
I'm using Gunicorn as an example, but it is essentially the same for uWSGI. There are various hacks when running multiple processes, to name a few:
use --preload option
use on_starting hook to start the APScheduler background scheduler
use when_ready hook to start the APScheduler background scheduler
They work to some extent but may get the following errors:
worker timing out frequently
scheduler hanging when there are no jobs https://github.com/agronholm/apscheduler/issues/305
APScheduler is designed to run in a single process where it has complete control over the process of adding jobs to job stores. It uses threading.Event's wait() and set() methods to coordinate. If they are run by different processes, the coordination wouldn't work.
It is possible to run it in Gunicorn in a single process.
use only one worker process
use the post_worker_init hook to start the scheduler, this will make sure the scheduler is run only in the worker process but not the master process
The author also pointed out sharing the job store amount multiple processes isn't possible. https://apscheduler.readthedocs.io/en/stable/faq.html#how-do-i-share-a-single-job-store-among-one-or-more-worker-processes He also provided a solution using RPyC.
While it's entirely doable to wrap APScheduler with a REST interface. You might want to consider serving it as a standalone app with one worker. In another word, if you have others endpoints, put them in another app where you can use multiple workers.
I'm developing a Django app which relies heavily on Celery task scheduling, using Redis as backend. Tasks can be set to run at a large periods of time, as well as in a few seconds/minutes.
I've read about Redis visibility timeout and consequences of scheduling tasks with timedelta greater than visibility timeout (I'm also in the process of dealing with it in a previous project), so I'm interested if there's anything neater than my solution, which is to have another "helper" task run 5 minutes before the "main" one needs to be executed, scheduling the "main" task to run in required time, storing task id in DB, and then checking in "main" task if the stored task id is the one that is being run. The last part (with task id storing) is required as multiple runs of "helper" task could spawn a lot of "main" task instances, but with this approach each will have different task id.
I really hate how that approach sounds and how it works, as if the task is scheduled to be run a month from current time, "helper" and "main" tasks are executed up to a hundred times.
I also know that it's an open issue, so I'm interested in more a neat workaround than a solution itself.
Having tested available options, in my opinion only using RabbitMQ as broker solves the whole problem.
Although it's a viable option for me, lack of some of redis configuration parameters (e.g. pool size) makes it unusable for those who are using hosting services with some limit on opened broker connection.
The maximum amount of time the pollForActivityTask method stays open polling for requests is 60 seconds. I am currently scheduling a cron job every minute to call my activity worker file so that my activity worker machine is constantly polling for jobs.
Is this the correct way to have continuous queue coverage?
The way that the Java Flow SDK does it and the way that you create an ActivityWorker, give it a tasklist, domain, activity implementations, and a few other settings. You set both the setPollThreadCount and setTaskExecutorSize. The polling threads long poll and then hand over work to the executor threads to avoid blocking further polling. You call start on the ActivityWorker to boot it up and when wanting to shutdown the workers, you can call one of the shutdown methods (usually best to call shutdownAndAwaitTermination).
Essentially your workers are long lived and need to deal with a few factors:
New versions of Activities
Various tasklists
Scaling independently on tasklist, activity implementations, workflow workers, host sizes, etc.
Handle error cases and deal with polling
Handle shutdowns (in case of deployments and new versions)
I ended using a solution where I had another script file that is called by a cron job every minute. This file checks whether an activity worker is already running in the background (if so, I assume a workflow execution is already being processed on the current server).
If no activity worker is there, then the previous long poll has completed and we launch the activity worker script again. If there is an activity worker already present, then the previous poll found a workflow execution and started processing so we refrain from launching another activity worker.
1) I am currently working on a web application that exposes a REST api and uses Django and Celery to handle request and solve them. For a request in order to get solved, there have to be submitted a set of celery tasks to an amqp queue, so that they get executed on workers (situated on other machines). Each task is very CPU intensive and takes very long (hours) to finish.
I have configured Celery to use also amqp as results-backend, and I am using RabbitMQ as Celery's broker.
Each task returns a result that needs to be stored afterwards in a DB, but not by the workers directly. Only the "central node" - the machine running django-celery and publishing tasks in the RabbitMQ queue - has access to this storage DB, so the results from the workers have to return somehow on this machine.
The question is how can I process the results of the tasks execution afterwards? So after a worker finishes, the result from it gets stored in the configured results-backend (amqp), but now I don't know what would be the best way to get the results from there and process them.
All I could find in the documentation is that you can either check on the results's status from time to time with:
result.state
which means that basically I need a dedicated piece of code that runs periodically this command, and therefore keeps busy a whole thread/process only with this, or to block everything with:
result.get()
until a task finishes, which is not what I wish.
The only solution I can think of is to have on the "central node" an extra thread that runs periodically a function that basically checks on the async_results returned by each task at its submission, and to take action if the task has a finished status.
Does anyone have any other suggestion?
Also, since the backend-results' processing takes place on the "central node", what I aim is to minimize the impact of this operation on this machine.
What would be the best way to do that?
2) How do people usually solve the problem of dealing with the results returned from the workers and put in the backend-results? (assuming that a backend-results has been configured)
I'm not sure if I fully understand your question, but take into account each task has a task id. If tasks are being sent by users you can store the ids and then check for the results using json as follows:
#urls.py
from djcelery.views import is_task_successful
urlpatterns += patterns('',
url(r'(?P<task_id>[\w\d\-\.]+)/done/?$', is_task_successful,
name='celery-is_task_successful'),
)
Other related concept is that of signals each finished task emits a signal. A finnished task will emit a task_success signal. More can be found on real time proc.
Is it possible to use Celery to set up multiple updating tasks to run simultaneously on Django/Heroku on just ONE worker? If I schedule certain functions to run every 5 minutes, will they automatically overlap in terms of when they start running, or will they wait till all other tasks are finished? I'm new to Celery and frankly vary confused over what it can do? ):
By default Celery uses multiprocessing to perform concurrent execution of tasks. Celery worker launches a pool of processes to consume tasks. The number of processes in a pool is set by --concurrency argument and defaults to the number of CPUs available on the machine.
So if the concurrency level is greater than one then the tasks will be processed in parallel.